Why I am Not Sharing Locations on Instagram

(it's not the reason you think it is)

Alternate title: why I’m sharing locations on Instagram differently than I used to.

Being online is sort of horrible, and I wish I’d known that before I made it part of my career. Don’t get me wrong— I get paid to hike, kayak, and take photos, and that’s incredible. But it also means I have people that I know, that I don’t, people who think they know me but don’t, offering me their unsolicited opinions on what I’m doing and how I’m doing it wrong all the time. And it’s exhausting and depressing.

You end up feeling very exposed, and vulnerable. I love writing, and I want to write for a living, and part of that means having an active social media presence. Is it worth it? It seems I’ve decided so.

There are a lot of reasons people share or don’t share locations on Instagram, but the one that comes up time and time again is Leave No Trace vs Gatekeeping.

The crux of this argument is that one group of people believes sharing locations on Instagram is inherently damaging the environment, all sharing of this information is wrong, and all people who share trail location information are engaging in something immoral for their own gain. The other group believes that this group is a group of Gatekeepers or people intentionally preventing others from accessing information about public land in order to keep these places to themselves under the guise of Leave No Trace. This group also believes the other group is immoral and doing this for their own gain.

Either way, you’re damned if you do— someone will tell you you personally are to thank for ruining that trail, and you are immoral and selfish. There’s a whole lot of correlation does not equal causation to unpack here; there are just more people in the world than there have ever been before, more people recreating outside than ever before, and some aspects of leave no trace are not obvious to everyone.

Many people don’t know you have to pack out toilet paper, banana peels, and orange peels, and in some areas even your own waste. Increasingly the cultural legacy of First Nations is a conversation in Leave No Trace both in the US and Canada— going off trail can not only cause erosion, but lead to damage of cultural sites. In many areas a no-dogs rule is established to protect local wildlife (think nesting endangered piping plovers in the Sleeping Bear Dunes), and many people ignore the rule because they don’t know the reason behind it. Personally, I believe putting in the time to do research on relevant LNT, cultural, and safety concerns in an area and creating resources where all of that information is readily available along with the location itself is an extremely solid way to practice and educate on Leave No Trace.

And of course, you’re damned if you don’t— Someone will explain to you the ways in which you’re a dirty dirty gatekeeper, and immoral and selfish for declining to provide information on demand.

(Talks of morality on the internet are cyclical and exhausting.)

There’s more nuance than this of course— no one should be obligated to share locations. Writing trail guides is work, and being asked to provide this information at the drop of a hat is asking a lot of work of someone who simply does not owe anyone that free work, and might not have the time. Photographers might choose not to share locations for a number of reasons that aren’t to prevent others from access— because that location is too close to their home and they’d like privacy, because it’s on private land they were granted access to, because they’re an artist and want to have an original composition, because if they do share a location of a photo it opens them up to a slew of DMs accusing them of personally ruining the environment, or because they simply weren’t thinking that hard about it.

And there are certainly more thoughtful and useful ways to share outdoor recreation locations than others— a clickbait article or reel with no relevant or even incorrect information about trail closures or potential risks is frustrating and does have the potential to be damaging.

But intentionally preventing others from creating trail guides and online resources or harassing people who do on the grounds that you believe you are more moral (or qualified) than them isn’t right either. When I first started writing and publishing trail guides, I received a lot of pushback, including some pretty heinous instances of harassment and rumors spread about me. I didn’t give away locations of specific trailheads on Instagram— rather wrote a whole, well-researched and several-thousand miles of hiking & paddling guidebook (something that plenty of other people have done). It didn’t matter; a few people didn’t like it, and had no problem letting me know in extremely aggressive ways reaching out of the internet and into my real life.

At the time I published the book, I had about 3,000 followers on Instagram and mostly used my account as a personal blog. Publishing the book and one viral reel brought 10,000 more eyes to my page, and to be honest I was not at all equipped to handle that many opinions about me directed at me. I’m not sure I handled it well.

There are three main reasons I’m shifting away from sharing specific trailheads on social media:

The first and foremost reason I’m shifting away from sharing exact locations is that I would like to have a little more privacy. I hated having people know exactly which small town I lived in. I hated when people messaged me they’d “be on the lookout” for me. It’s really no fault of these people— I made it obvious where I lived and where you could find me, because I posted a lot of my favorite local hikes, and people worked out when I would usually be there (sunrise is sunrise, ya know?). Moving has been an opportunity to not do that.

The second reason is that I work really hard to write detailed, useful trail guides that address both safety and environmental concerns in the area. Probably 90% of these trail guides are totally free and funded by my generous, beautiful, wonderful paying subscribers, and with the amount of work I put into them I want people to read them! I cover pretty much every single location pictured on my Instagram feed, and I’ve put a lot of work into making this information easy to access and useful in a more permanent space than Instagram.

Spaces like Instagram incentivize clickbait-style content, anything that keeps you scrolling and your dopamine levels high, anything that makes you angry or sad or feel something, anything that takes you out of the world in front of you and puts you into the online one. It’s not the space I want to spend most of my energy writing in (this is, welcome to my Substack).

All in all, I’m generally choosing not to share specific trailheads from recent hikes/paddles on Instagram or Tiktok simply as a boundary— I don’t want people trying to guess where I live. I don’t want people messaging me that they’re on the lookout for me.

That being said, I will still publish detailed trail guides for 90% of the hikes I do and places I visit here on Substack and list them on the Free Trail Guides archive. If you do see me in public, feel free to say hi! I’m very friendly, and will not be creeped out.

But please don’t try to find me, and please don’t try to guess where I live.

Being visible on the internet has been such a strange experience— people you know as acquaintances expect you to use your “platform” a certain way, and will express disappointment if you don’t. Strangers regard you as if you’re a close friend; they expect more of your time than you have to give. Other strangers decide you have a charmed life and decide to take you down a peg— doesn’t she deserve some adversity in her obviously perfect life? People see you as someone with social power and hold your actions and rhetoric to a ridiculous standard; you see yourself as a normal person, and take critique of your words as critique of your character. You know it's not personal, because people do not know you the person; it feels personal nonetheless. People will read your words and see themselves in them; they will decide you've written about them. Maybe they decide that you're soulmates, though you don't know them. They'll let you know they think this and that you should give them a chance. Or maybe they'll be angry about the words they've decided are about them. Maybe they'll let you know about that too.

There’s not any warning for this kind of visibility— no one tells you how this happens, even for someone with a relatively small online presence.

At this point, the best thing I can do is practice thoughtful boundaries and information sharing.

I never share images of my car on social media. I never post pictures from a location while I am still in that location. I even try and be mindful of the clothes I wear in Instagram photos versus what I wear out generally. And now, I’m limiting the locations I share on Instagram— it’s just too close to home.